Category: Culture

I was going to watch Infernal Affairs last night but then I said “whoa, Bryant. Cut back on the noir. There’s been nothing but for a while; maybe it’s time for a break?” In service of purging the noir obsession from my system, let’s get the last two movies I saw at the Brattle L.A. Noir series into one post, shall we? It’s especially convenient since they were a double bill. Sounds like a plan.

First, Criss Cross. It’s a quintessentially noir story about a big lug who’s in love with the wrong woman; he left her, and when he comes back, she’s involved with a local gangster. Nobody in a noir ever says “Well, we screwed up, and we have to live with the consequences.” These two are no exception, and before you know it the only way out is to screw up even further.

Burt Lancaster is a big dope in the lead role. That’s not really a criticism — he’s fine in the part, which isn’t too demanding. He’s got to be in love, and he’s got to be dumb enough to be duped. Yvonne De Carlo is a great femme fatal, pretty and sultry and just a little tawdry. In my book, the really good performances were Dan Duryea as the gangster and Stephen McNally as the detective trying to help his pal. (His great line: “I should have been a better friend. I shoulda stopped you. I shoulda grabbed you by the neck, I shoulda kicked your teeth in. I’m sorry, Steve.”)

What else? Structurally sound, satisfying, a really great set piece for the end of the movie which appears to be located at the end of the world. It was remade by Stephen Soderbergh as Underneath; I’m betting that’s one of the reasons it was chosen for this series. With this alongside Point Blank, you begin to see the outlines of the ways in which these noirs influenced Soderbergh.

The other reason’s got to be the astoundingly surreal robbery scene: it takes place in a cloud of poisonous gas, with all the gangsters wearing gas masks, and I almost gasped when I saw what was happening. Lancaster is without a mask, and the gangsters come looming out of the fog with this inhuman masks on their faces and guns in their hand, and the paranoid tension just hits a whole new level. It’s man facing an alien world of the future. (C.f. Point Blank again.) Awesome, awesome scene.

And then I saw This Gun For Hire. Skipping to the end for a second: gas masks play a pivotal role. Heh. And Yvonne De Carlo has a bit part. So Criss Cross was the perfect prelude, even though it’s not an exceptional movie.

That is not the case for This Gun For Hire, which left me with a warm little glow in my tummy. Yeah, it’s a grim story of a lone assassin who was abused by his aunt, but so what? It’s a great understated tale and those make me happy. It’s also the seminal grim story of a lone assassin: John Woo lifted the theme by way of Le Samourai for The Killer, Jean Reno’s Leon owes his style to Alan Ladd’s Philip Raven, and I could go on for quite a while.

So what’s so great about This Gun For Hire? Besides Alan Ladd, it’s also got Veronica Lake, who kindly defines winsome for us. She’s not really the type to wind up with her cop fiancee — she’s a nightclub performer who instinctively wants to help the stone cold killer. But hey, it’s a Code movie, what are you going to do?

Mostly, though, it’s got Alan Ladd. Touch on Point Blank again: This Gun For Hire is also about a criminal going down from San Francisco to Los Angeles for revenge. Alan Ladd’s as stony as Lee Marvin (except for one misconceived scene where he breaks down in front of Veronica Lake), but it’s a cooler, more cerebral calm. He knows he’s been done wrong, and he’s getting revenge not for the sake of revenge but for the sake of business. Unlike Lee Marvin, he gets what he wants at the end. Like Lee Marvin, he pays a price.

And despite it being a Code movie, Alan Ladd has a distinct edge. There’s a moment quite early on when I said “He’s not going to shoot that woman — ah, see, his gun misfired! It’s an out!” I was quite wrong. There’s no effort to paint him as evil: he’s just a man who happens to kill for a living. No compunctions.

Somewhere between Graham Greene’s novel and the screen, a fairly noticeable dose of patriotism crept into the movie. I wound up deciding that Ladd wasn’t motivated by the patriotic appeals, though, even if Veronica Lake was. The key was the woman and the desire to do good — not for his country, but for her. To think of him as a hitman who decides to fight for America weakens the movie by abstracting his decision.

So there you go. A whole lot of noir this week. Maybe I’ll divert myself with some classic comedies next; nice change of pace, you know?

The sterility of the computer-generated backgrounds is as repellent as the archaic gender stereotypes forced upon all the women in Sin City. Soulless excess fueled by unreasonable violence in a fantasy of a world that never should be: pah!

Nah, not really. It fucking rocked. You could get bitchy about how Rodriguez just laid the comic book out on the screen, but nobody gets snotty about faithful adaptations of Shakespeare. It’s a high-octane, note-perfect accomplishment. I dunno if I’d call it great cinema, although I think the cinematography and the use of black and white was superb… hm. Maybe I would call it great cinema. It’s easy to discount the look of the film and the skilled use of spot color cause it was filmed in digital. That’s a mistake. Filming in digital doesn’t make beauty easy. Just look at what Photoshop can do in unskilled hands for proof of that.

Really strong acting from most of the leads, with the exception of Jessica Alba, who wasn’t terrible. Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, and Mickey Rourke all shone. Each in different ways, too; it wasn’t just a bunch of cookie-cutter performances. Clive Owen got to be ultra-competent, Mickey Rourke got to be big and dumb and violent, and Bruce Willis got to be tired. So no, they weren’t working against their strengths. Still good performances all around. Rosario Dawson and Jamie King were just as good, too.

Brittany Murphy was awful. She didn’t have any sense of the rhythms of the story or of the movie. It’s pretty obvious she was supposed to be a lightweight; she went beyond that, though, into being a distraction. She’s not in a whole lot of scenes, however. All the other supporting actors were dandy. Particular kudos to Benicio Del Toro, no surprise there, and Rutger Hauer.

You could talk a lot about the gender roles. The women are all sex objects. The men are all inert until motivated by the need to protect/defend/avenge a woman. This short-changes both genders, if you want to be picky about it. Me, I figured I was watching a noir and made mental note that I wouldn’t want to be stuck in either gender role.

I was also more interested in the unabashed shotgun wedding between sex and death. Clive Owen and Rosario Dawson do it best, partially because their segment is all about hookers killing people and partially because it’s right up Owen’s alley: he has that air of violence around him, much like Russell Crowe. (Remember that first scene in L.A. Confidential?) Not to mention they’ve got Miho riding shotgun behind them, and she’s reduced her ability to communicate down to one razor-edged essential technique. It’s a very hot movie, and it’s the kind of setting where you don’t get laid unless you’re ready to die.

So there you go. Lots of essential primal urges, lots of violence, lots of velocity. Tons of velocity, in all possible senses of the word. If you’re gonna see it, be ready to wallow.

The Brattle film calendar wonders how John Boorman could make a movie as good as Point Blank and then go on to make something as lousy as Zardoz. But come on: Boorman is all about the semi-surreal fractured narrative, and you can draw a clear line from one movie to the other.

Point Blank is a ruthless reinvention of the crime movie. The skeleton is pure pulp, adapted from a Donald Westlake book. Westlake has been writing unpretentious genre books for decades, so it’s a good base. But you’re not more than 10 minutes into the movie before the chronology starts shattering and lines start repeating and overlapping and you have to start wondering if it’s a sequence of events or Lee Marvin’s deathbed dream. Trippy stuff. Now I know where Soderbergh picked up the techniques he used in The Limey and Out of Sight.

Lee Marvin’s Walker is not a killer — he never actually kills anyone in the movie — but is rather the Angel of Death. His presence brings mortality with it. The Organization he fights is criminal in nature on the surface; beneath that, though, it’s a metaphor for any corporation. The leaders of the Organization live in offices and well-appointed homes with swimming pools. Walker, for all his lack of sixties trappings, is the revolutionary trying to bring down the state — not because of principles or ideals. Just for revenge.

Given the ending, given that Walker’s simply being manipulated in what amounts to a series of layoffs, I think the implications of rebellion aren’t imagined. There’s this nihilistic implication that even the rebels are being used by the (pardon my cliche) Man. Walker’s success is as empty as his life.

And come on: he travels from San Francisco, where he was happy, to Los Angeles, where corruption lives. If that’s not the sixties in a nutshell, I don’t know what is.